Origen

The idea behind write in the ancient Germanic languages was ‘to score or carve’—people in northern Europe would have written first by inscribing letters on wood. The original meaning in Old English was ‘to draw or outline the shape of something’. The first person to use the phrase nothing to write home about, meaning ‘be mediocre or unexceptional’, appears to have been the comic writer Ian Hay in 1914. Hay was also a soldier who served in the First World War and was awarded the Military Cross, and the expression was probably a military one ( see also fun). If you say that a particular quality or feeling is written all over someone's face, you are echoing Shakespeare. In Measure for Measure Duke Vincentio says: ‘There is written in your brow, Provost, honesty, and constancy.’ See also wall

be (or have something) written all over one (or one's face)

Four of the five goals had quality written all over them, several of the points were also out of the top drawer, and there were several individual performances on both sides that further embellished this magnificent game.

write someone in

The Chronicle and several other local papers exposed the plan after an 18-year old was recruited to run, but then changed his mind when he found out that he had been written in as a Democratic candidate.

I shook his hand just before the primary up here and told him I was a registered Republican and I was writing him in on my ballot.

Even though his name wasn't on the ballot, he was written in by nearly half of the voters.

A claimant whose motor car is damaged by the negligent driving of the defendant will either incur expense in putting right the damage or discard the vehicle, i.e., write it off as uneconomic to repair.

Magistrates heard that the man used a concrete slab to smash every window in the vehicle and cause such extensive damage that the vehicle was written off by the insurance company.

He said at least two vehicles were written off and that the total cost of the damage could amount to £150,000 though the final figures were still not known.

Derivados

writable

So the ‘old’ idea of combining read-only and writable sectors has resurfaced to facilitate the rise of e-books, but now it benefits from the new reality that practically every computer has a CD-ROM reader.

To burn a DVD, you'll need a writable DVD drive, but the miniDVD is essentially DVD-formatted video on a standard CD-R disc that plays only on a computer.

In this aggressive environment, optical technology is proving its value as a high-capacity, long data life, random-access writable technology.